Becky Hansmeyer has an interesting approach to her review of the new MacBook Pro.

This isn’t going to be your typical MacBook review because there are plenty of those out there and most of them are very good. This review is for people who don’t give two craps how this year’s model compares to last year’s model and instead want to know how this year’s model compares to their crusty old ThickBook Pro from five years ago because that’s the one they’re upgrading from. Cool? Cool.

At one point in Rogue One, Galen Erso explicitly invokes the justification that they’d find someone else to do this work anyway. It sounds a lot like Tim Cook’s memo to Apple staff justifying his presence at a roundtable gathering that legitimised the election of a misogynist bigot to the highest office in the land. I’m sure that Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sheryl Sandberg all think they are playing the part of Galen Erso but I wonder if they’ll soon find themselves indistinguishable from Orson Krennic.

Interesting piece by Jeremy Keith. I think all of us, regardless of what line of business we’re in, should consider whether the work we do for a living results in something that we really can stand behind, morally speaking. And if it doesn’t, perhaps we should try, if possible, to find something else to do to pay the bills.

I agree, and Manton’s upcoming Micro.blog seems like a great place to go for this.

If you haven’t yet backed Manton’s Kickstarter you really should. Sure, it’s already way past its funding goal, but by adding you money to the pile you’ll help show Manton that there’s a big demand for this kind of service.

Manton Reece has finally launched the Kickstarter for his Micro.blog project (formerly Snippets.today). If, like me, you’re interested in the open web and a more decentralized future online you should back this project. I think Manton’s onto something big, something much more sustainable then the good old Twitter clones.

Hi, my name is Manton Reece, and I’m writing a book called Indie Microblogging. I’m also launching a brand new platform for microblogs.

[…]

I want to encourage more independent writing. To do that, we need better tools that embrace microblogs and the advantages of the open web. We need to learn from the success and user experience of social networking, but applied to the full scope of the web.

I first set out to build a new service just for microblogs. It has a timeline experience like a social network, with replies and favorites, but it’s based on RSS, with the main posts pulled from independent sites.

The Curta Calculators is such fascinating devices. I first heard about something like them when a friend showed me an old mechanical calculator that he’d picked up from an antics shop. Later I read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson where a Curta plays an important role.

Jason Snell of Six Colors made a YouTube video as a companion to his MacBook Pro with a touch bar review. In the video he demonstrates how the touch bar behaves in different situations.

Depending on third party adoption of the touch bar, and whether Apple will roll it out to its entire product line fast enough or not, it may either be a very interning new paradigm for computer interaction or it will be a footnote on the road to touch screens everywhere.

Back in 2013, legendary Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki announced he would be retiring; making no more feature-length films in order to concentrate on smaller projects. Well, it turns out you can’t keep a good Oscar-winning artist down, and Miyazaki says he’s now coming out of retirement to make one last movie.

Mark Brown’s video series ”Gamemaker’s Toolkit” is very interesting to watch. In the episode Nintendo – Putting Play First I think he manages to explain to me why the games I play almost exclusively are first-party Nintendo games.

Manton Reece expresses an opinion similar to mine when it comes to the new MacBook Pros with nothing but USB-C ports and the comparisons of them to a headphone-less iPhone.

I have no problems with USB-C on the new MacBook Pro. It will be a small headache at the beginning, for sure. But because it’s a standard there’s no long-term compatibility risk the way there is with removing the 3.5mm headphone jack.

Jeremy Keith writes about being on Twitter for ten years and comments on how things have changed on Twitter at large and, more importantly, on Twitter for him as he for the past few years has been treating it as nothing but a syndication service. I do the same and for the past few months I’ve visited Twitter.com very rarely and I no longer have any Twitter client installed on my iOS devices. It’s liberating to know that you own your content and as long as you keep your site running it’ll live on regardless of the rise and fall of various social networks.

I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around.

That last paragraph rings so true to me. I intend to live for at least fifty more years and I hope my blog will be with me all the way. How many huge companies have existed for fifty years? How many of those have not changed in significant ways in fifty years? Do we really think that the social media of today will preserve our ideas, our quips and snapshots, and our memories – happy and sad – for the foreseeable future? Or do we not care if they don’t?